A game show featuring Stalin would be a suitably absurd comedy sketch, yet it’s not far from the truth.

What’s my Line is a perfect American, Post Modern, TV masterpiece. A piece of cheap, light entertainment that featured several of the most important people of the 20th Century in the context of a game show. People that later ruled countries (Ford, Carter, Reagan), appear in museums (Dali), created the museums themselves (Frank Lloyd Wright) or became cultural icons (Walt Disney) were all ‘What’s my Line’ contestants.

If the chalkboard where people wrote their names were preserved, it would be a museum piece.

I’ll embed more that I can find in the comment’s (feel free to do so too). In the mean time, for you enjoyment, here is America’s most famous architect in history playing What’s my Line.

“Michael Kloft’s documentary on the history of Nazi television…As early as the ‘thirties, a bitter rivalry raged for the world’s first television broadcast. Nazi Germany wanted to beat the competition from Great Britain and the U.S. – at all costs.”

Spiegel TV has tracked down rare Nazi TV footage, complete with everything from bizarre cabaret acts to interviews with people like Albert Speer. Pop culture done by Nazis, the banality of showbiz evil.

“When I posted the clip from True Stories of David Byrne deadpanning his way through the history of Texas, I didn’t realize that it would be YDA’s last real post. But if pressed to choose a closing statement, I’d be hard-pressed to select something more appropriate to this blog’s sensibilities.”

Charlton Heston was simultaneously a Civil Rights activist and the head of the NRA. Confused? Well this will either help or perplex you beyond caring. Not something to sit through the whole of, but it does give some insight as to how odd Charlton Heston was.

Some fundamentalists believe that the Earth is a few thousand years old and that rocks and dinosaurs are too. This piece suggests that Charlton (what a great first name) believed that modern humans were millions of years old instead.

An amateur pop promo made by people working at CERN in the 90s. The people in this video were the subject of the first ever photo on the web.

According to band member, Silvano de Gennaro:

“Back in 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, my colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of “the CERN girls” to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the “World Wide Web”. I had only a vague idea of what that was, but I scanned some photos on my Mac and FTPed them to Tim’s now famous “info.cern.ch”.”